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Month: July 2012

Matt Cutt’s recent interview with Danny Sullivan stirred a great fear in the SEO industry when he briefly mentioned “over-optimization“. Webmasters started to speculate what contributes to over-optimization and the results were getting ridiculous. Some even said bolding a keyword is over-optimization, while it wasn’t.

Further into the same interview, Matt Cutts also explained that Google loves SEO. Comparing two sites, one with SEO and one without, Google prefers the SEOed site as it helps GoogleBot understand better. This is also the reason why Google is leveling the playing field, so genuine SEO works better while blackhat SEO gets punished.

Over-optimization does not happen easily. It is a condition that your website is having way way too much of SEO, not the legitimate ones, but those that is obvious to game the search engines. In other words, it is optimization beyond acceptable limit. Some of the red-flags to check for:

1. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is when your website use too many keywords in their content. There is no clear threshold, but when your content contains too many keywords that’s beyond readable, you probably have too many keywords. A natural keyword density will be around 2% to 4%. Reason is, with keyword density of less than 2%, your content may not be focused enough on the topic. Keyword desity of more than 4%, the content will probably be hard to read. It’s not a rule to be within 2% to 4%, but most great content that ranks high and readable stays within 2% to 4% naturally. Try to keep your keyword density reasonable to prevent over-optimization.

2. Hidden Text

Hidden text is old, but we are still seeing people using this to game the search engines. Hidden text is some text which invisible to human eyes but included in the HTML source. Example is when the text color is the same as the page background. More advanced hidden text will be keyword stuffing in image-metas, JavaScript keyword stuffing and CSS stuffing. Google just recently announced that they are able to crawl JavaScript and Css now, so it’s time to rethink your strategy if you are blackhatting! This form of over-optimization will no longer go unnoticed!

3. Duplicate Content

If you copy and paste some paragraphs from other websites into yours, Google and other search engines would flag your content as duplicate and it can drop out your search result. This happens during the Panda update. Google is getting better and better at recognizing who’s original and who’s copycat, which is a good news to the thought leaders.

4. Cloaking Links or Links Spam

Cloaking links is a no-no since very long ago. Link spamming is also dangerous. Basically, any blackhat redirects or door-way pages are all frown upon. Other than this, also check the number of links on your site. If you have too many links pointing here and there just for the purpose of passing link juice that does not help visitor to navigate, remove those links. Google’s tracking visitor behavior and they know which link is necessary, which link is just redundant.

These are just some of the important clues to look for when it comes to over-optimization. To ensure you are not over-optimizing, always follow SEOPressor‘s suggestions. SEOPressor has helped more than 15 million wordpress pages to stay on top of the game. You can probably see some of your competing pages are using SEOPressor. It was released 2 years ago anticipating today’s changes and now, users using SEOPressor see their ranking flourish.

Many SEOPressor users found their site’s ranking performance improving during Panda’s update and improve even more during the recent Penguin’s update. Daniel Tan expressed that they forecast true and genuine SEO will be the way to go, and hence SEOPressor was created to benefit webmasters. It is impossible to achieve over-optimization while using SEOPressor.

Mentoring, in my opinion, is the strongest form of guidance and team building around. However, it may not be for everyone so I am going to discuss a few different leadership styles. Being a guide for someone is definitely not an easy task. You have to be experienced enough to be able to share knowledge and wisdom, and, you need to be able to know how to share your knowledge and wisdom well enough in order to be understood. You also have to know how to approach people, how to empower and encourage them, and how to make them feel better about themselves without babying them.

There are many different ways that you can be a guide, and it all depends on what you aim to do, as well as on how much control you are willing to exert. There are three main paths that you may want to take as the guide, and you can do this through mentoring, coaching, or directing. Although these three types of guidance are often mixed together or interchanged in both conversation and media, there are actually subtle differences amongst them that you need to understand.

In mentoring, you are dealing with a relationship between a mentor (you), who is more experienced, knowledgeable, and wise; and a protégé, who is less experienced, probably (but not always) younger, and sometimes flighty and uncertain. A mentor will often be more prominent than the protégé, or more skilled in a particular field. The mentor is then the teacher of the protégé, and serves as the guide for the protégé to do better in the field. Most often, a mentor will teach by example on the job itself: for instance, a mentor opera singer will have a protégé who the opera singer will take on while the opera singer is at the peak of his or her career, and while the protégé is just starting out. By emulating the opera singer, the protégé will hopefully succeed one day as well. This is the basis of mentoring.

On the other hand, coaching refers to a guidance process in which a person, acting as a leader, oversees a group of persons, or sometimes even a single person, with the aim of achieving a goal. Coaching differs from mentoring in that a coach will often be out of or done with his or her career already, and will therefore be teaching a younger generation based on their experiences. Another difference between coaching and mentoring is that coaching often has only a single goal in mind, while mentoring might be more abstract and widespread in its aims.

Coaching is most popularly seen in sports teams, where a person who has once been a good player is now helping other players to succeed in their game, and with the aim of as many victories as possible for the team. Another popular coaching technique is that of life coaching. In this case, a person is already successful enough and is probably ready for retirement, but is coaching other people in making their lives start to work. In a variant of life coaching, a person who has already faced all of his or her fears can also coach persons who are still living in fear, helping them to get over their anxieties and emerge as better people.

Lastly, the process of directing involves the instruction of a higher person to that of a lower person. In the mentoring relationship, the mentor acts as a guide, not as someone who makes orders; a guide will steer a student through to the right path, but not point it out directly. In the coach and team relationship, the coach acts as an encouraging person, and even as a trainer, but not as someone who directly tells the team what to do. In directing, a boss-employee relationship would be closer in definition, especially when the higher person is ordering the lower person on how exactly to live his or her life.

One of the best ways to gain the knowledge and skills needed for mentoring upcoming internet marketers is to attend these FREEWeekly Marketing Webinars with me. With the content provided in these free webinars you will be well on your way to establishing yourself as someone who people will seek mentoring from. Building business does take time and to truly build a great team around you you must have knowledge and offer value through mentoring. If you are looking for the fast track to get started you have to check out the Authority Content Profit System which will brand YOU as the expert while you learn other systems. In the end possessing the actual knowledge and being able to relay that knowledge to others via mentoring will not only build a better business but a stronger relationship between you and your team.